One Earth
Commentary
Overcoming Political Climate-Change Apathy in the Era of #FridaysForFuture
Thomas Schinko1,*
1Risk and Resilience Program, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, 2361 Laxenburg, Austria
*Correspondence:schinko@iiasa.ac.at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2019.12.012
The non-result of the 2019 UN Climate Change Conference (COP25) confirmed that consensual political will for implementing the Paris Agreement is still lacking despite strident protests by civil society actors, such as
#FridaysForFuture. Breaking this deadlock requires not only reconsidering global climate-governance archi- tectures but also a more pronounced stance of researchers at the science-policy-society interface.
The climate crisis will become one of the greatest existential threats to humanity if global warming cannot be limited to a maximum of +2C above pre-industrial levels by the end of this century. Predic- tions show that continuing on a baseline emissions trajectory—without additional mitigation—will lead to 3.7C–4.8C of warming with catastrophic impacts, both those we expect and those we cannot imagine.1 Successful implemen- tation of voluntary pledges that have been made by parties to the United Na- tions Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)—the nationally deter- mined contributions—would predictably put the world on track for 2.7C–3.0C warming compared with pre-industrial levels.2 This falls far short of the goals set out in the Paris Agreement. Despite this dire prognosis, the political will for consequent implementation of the 2015 Paris Agreement is still lacking, confirmed once again by the failure of the 25th Conference of Parties (COP) in Madrid to deliver on the implementation of the Paris Agreement. In addition, and intricately linked, society is facing further grand challenges, including unprece- dented levels of biodiversity loss, land degradation, water scarcity, and rapid urban growth just to name a few.
Meeting the Paris goals and tackling the other manifold social-ecological chal- lenges will require a fundamental reconfi- guration of the predominant resource- intensive way of sustaining our societies, that is, a comprehensive social-ecolog- ical transformation across all areas of life. This will involve not only large-scale deployment of a broad portfolio of low- carbon technologies but also substantial behavioral changes.3 Dealing with the
inevitable residual impacts will necessi- tate transformational adaptation and risk-management strategies.4
Action on the climate crisis and other societal challenges still faces political gridlock due to powerful lobby groups’
vested interests and ideological beliefs, causing other—real or perceived—prior- ities to take preference over a transforma- tion toward a sustainable society. The non-result of the recent 2019 UN Climate Change Conference (COP25) in Madrid has shown again that particularly those countries where governments have close ties to the coal, oil, and agricultural indus- tries show strong resistance in scaling up climate-policy ambitions. The individual, short-term economic-benefit thinking of powerful industries keeps postponing the urgently needed low-carbon transfor- mation of our societies and thereby passes the increasingly difficult task onto future generations. Across the globe, countries are facing non-existent or failed climate-governance regimes—current policy and decision-making arrange- ments (including the UNFCCC’s COP format, which is based on consensual de- cision-making procedures) appear inca- pable of solving the climate crisis or, indeed, other highly complex global chal- lenges of the Anthropocene.5
At the same time, the world has been witnessing newly emerging youth-led bot- tom-up and grass-roots movements pro- testing government inaction on the climate crisis since the beginning of 2019. A simple but unambiguous mes- sage emerged as a common denominator of these individual groups: ‘‘listen to the science.’’6 These movements have gained visibility and traction, and many have managed to escalate climate policy
to the center of public conversation and mainstream media attention. Moreover, these growing movements are important not only regarding their potential impact on climate policy but also because they generate a cohort of democratically active citizens.7 Next to ‘‘Extinction Rebellion’’
and the ‘‘Sunrise Movement,’’ one of the most prominent of its kind is the
‘‘#FridaysForFuture’’ initiative. During COP25, these civil society actors stri- dently called for completing the remaining tasks in operationalizing the Paris Agree- ment. Unfortunately, they had little suc- cess and have even been barred from the UN climate talks after staging an un- authorized protest at the COP venue.
To support #FridaysForFuture’s claims with the best available scientific evi- dence, a group of German, Austrian, and Swiss scientists (from the so-called DACH region) came together in early 2019 as ‘‘Scientists for Future’’ (S4F) to declare: ‘‘[The young protesters’] con- cerns are justified and supported by the best available science. The current mea- sures for protecting the climate and biosphere are deeply inadequate.’’8 More than 26,000 scientists across all scientific disciplines have signed a state- ment started by this group of scientists. I have been part of S4F in Austria, where I act at the intersection of the two initia- tives. When I officially ‘‘handed over’’
the S4F statement to the young activists in March 2019 in front of some 30,000 people at the Heldenplatz in Vienna (Figure 1), I realized that a potentially unique window of opportunity was open- ing. I began pondering how these bur- geoning youth-led movements might catalyze broader public support for and engagement in the social-ecological 20 One Earth2, January 24, 2020ª2020 Elsevier Inc.
transformation. Scaling up is key, given that current empirical research on non- violent activism has shown that only as much as 3.5%–5% of a nation’s popula- tion can be sufficient to kick off transfor- mational political processes.9,10But how do we reach this critical threshold in the case of the transformation to a low-car- bon climate-resilient society such that elected political leaders eventually have to get active on this ‘‘wicked’’
problem?11
Building Blocks of the Social- Ecological Transformation
After I’ve talked to many young activists, laypersons, research colleagues, practi- tioners, and policy makers since then, three aspects have crystalized as essen- tial building blocks for catalyzing broad public support for the social-ecological transformation that #FridaysForFuture and other climate movements are demanding. However, these building blocks are subject to serious barriers that need to be tackled, and science can play an important role in doing so.
A first building block toward broad pub- lic support of and engagement in the so-
cial-ecological transformation is a broad realization of the existential risk that the climate crisis is imposing on us humans.
Only when a representative part of society arrives at a shared understanding of the problem and sees the urgent need for tak- ing action will climate change become a central topic in public and political dis- courses. Initiatives such as #FridaysFor- Future or Extinction Rebellion are now fostering substantial public support for the topic, which already materializes in many political parties jumping on the climate-crisis bandwagon in the DACH re- gion, the US, and elsewhere. However, serious barriers toward an even broader realization of the problem still exist. These barriers relate to the regional and tempo- ral disconnect between the causes and impacts of climate change, as well as to manufactured uncertainties about climate change by climate-change denialists, who are steered by vested industrial, po- litical, and ideological interests.
A second building block relates to governance issues in identifying and im- plementing concrete options for tackling the climate crisis. This aspect is con- strained by the fact that often roles and
responsibilities for acting against the climate crises are not clearly identified and allocated across different levels of governance and individual stakeholders.
Hence, even though potential solutions exist, no one feels responsible for their im- plementation. This barrier is paramount for both climate-change mitigation and adaptation. Where soft and hard limits to adaptation occur, there might not even exist socioeconomically or technologi- cally feasible options to deal with climate-related impacts. Options and governance frameworks to deal with the resulting losses and damages from climate change are still not readily avail- able and are the subject of fierce policy debate.12
A third building block relates to individ- ual risk perceptions and perceived self- efficacy. Further barriers exist in this context at both the individual and collec- tive levels. At both levels, fatalism (the belief that the climate crisis is unstop- pable) decreases behavioral and policy responses to climate change.13A related aspect concerns perceived self-efficacy.
If individuals or collectives, such as the above-presented bottom-up youth-led Figure 1. The Author (at the Very Bottom Right) ‘‘Handing Over’’ the S4F Statement, which Was Signed by More Than 26,000 Scientists from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, on March 15, 2019, at the Heldenplatz in Vienna, Austria
Copyright: Climate Change Center Austria.
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Commentary
One Earth2, January 24, 2020 21
initiatives, get the feeling that their activism does not have an impact on climate-change policy and practice, they will experience frustration and might stop investing their energy into mastering the social-ecological transformation.
Usurpation of individuals or socioenviron- mental initiatives by political actors to gloss over their own insufficient re- sponses can have an equally thwarting ef- fect on sustainability action even among the concerned. Moreover, although indi- vidual actions for mitigating and adapting to the climate crisis are important, having the right framework conditions in place is even more relevant. Without the right incentive structures (e.g., national and su- pranational tax and subsidy schemes) in place, individual measures taken by a subgroup of the population will not be suf- ficient to achieve the substantial reduc- tion of greenhouse gas emissions neces- sary for remaining below 2C global warming. Currently, the #FridaysForFu- ture movement is still running strong, as reflected by the many local, national, and even global climate strikes that the young activists have organized during 2019. This could change, however, if concrete results in terms of more ambi- tious climate-policy measures do not materialize.
A New Role for Science
Discussing the building blocks and asso- ciated barriers for fostering individual and collective action on the climate crisis brings to the forefront that an informed society with a high expectation of self-ef- ficacy is key to mastering the social- ecological transformation toward a sustainable society. Moreover, it be- comes apparent that governance—the in- stitutions, rules, conventions, processes, and mechanisms by which policy deci- sions are taken and implemented—is critical yet sorely underdeveloped for the social-ecological risks facing humankind.
Governance is more than government, and transformation will require a signifi- cant engagement not only of the state but also of the scientific community, mar- ket actors, and civil society.
Considering this, research must also change its scientific approaches, its methods of science communication, and its perceived role in society. Truly inter- and transdisciplinary research is needed to support the complex transformation to-
ward a sustainable society and the inte- gration of novel civil society bottom-up initiatives with top-down policy and deci- sion making. To that end, it is crucial that transformative science apply a comprehensive systems perspective by integrating (1) the long-standing tradition of top-down model-based systems anal- ysis for informing society about the poten- tial consequences of (in)action on the climate crisis with (2) bottom-up soft sys- tems analysis for informing and engaging with stakeholders and transforming governance institutions and processes.
Engaging multiple actors with their alter- native problem frames and aspirations for sustainable futures is now recognized as essential for effective governance processes and ultimately for robust policy implementation.14 Indeed, some researchers see the 21stcentury as the
‘‘post-participation era’’ because of the growing recognition that stakeholders need not be merely participants in expert-generated policy strategies; ex- perts can be participants in stakeholder- generated strategies—what is termed co-generation. Co-generation requires active and meaningful engagement of ex- perts with policy actors across the whole policy cycle—from problem framing to policy implementation. This also means that novel research methods for compre- hensive stakeholder engagement (e.g., social simulations that support the identi- fication of roles and responsibilities in climate-change mitigation and adapta- tion) must be developed and employed.15 Researchers have to leave their comfort zones and connect more directly with all parts of society, for example, in citizens’
fora, where the current knowledge base on climate change—the scientific facts—
is being openly discussed and false facts are being debunked. Through my recent engagement in the S4F movement and my experience in systems and sustain- ability science, I realize that the role of sci- ence is already changing from ‘‘advisor’’
to ‘‘partner’’ in civil society, policy making, and decision making. By doing so, scien- tists can play an important active role in implementing the desperately needed so- cial-ecological transformation of our soci- ety without becoming policy prescriptive.
The recent failure of COP25 has shown that societal engagement of the scientific community is more urgently needed than ever in order to lay the objective facts on
the table and thereby further increase the pressure on the obstructionist states.
If there is a positive aspect to the results of COP25, it is the fact that the increasing pushback by the foot draggers can be in- terpreted as their last frantic response against a growing consensus throughout society that a low-carbon climate resilient transformation is inevitable. Let us not miss this window of opportunity that the young generation’s demonstrations for a sustainable future have opened.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author is thankful for many inspiring discus- sions with actors from research, civil society, pol- icy and decision making, arts and culture, and the private sector throughout 2019. The author particularly thanks JoAnne Linnerooth-Bayer for providing detailed feedback on an earlier version of this manuscript.
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